`Great Shame'

Australian Writer Hangs Out Green Laundry In Epic Work On The Irish Diaspora

January 12, 2000|By Mel Gussow, New York Times News Service.

At the end of "The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World," his monumental new book about the Irish diaspora, Thomas Keneally says that writing it "was an experience akin to being locked in a cupboard with a Tyrannosaurus rex." During a recent visit to New York, Keneally acknowledged the difficulty of the project and added, "It was the longest endeavor I've ever embarked upon."

Before "The Great Shame" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), he had written more than 20 novels, including "Schindler's List," generally spending less than two years on each. The new book took him more than five years of painstaking work. The result is a densely researched, vividly detailed account of 80 years of Irish history, beginning in the mid-19th century. By 1922, when the book ends, Ireland had lost half its population, most of it because of the famine or through forced migration. Political prisoners and others convicted of minor offenses were transported to Australia, and from there some of them eventually made their way to the United States.

At the core of the 712-page book is the transformation of convicts (who include relatives of both Keneally and his wife) into leaders in politics, business and the arts. Because of those family connections and the fact that he is Australian, he felt "a kind of ancestral weight to tell this story."

He said that the title has three meanings: as a reference to the mismanagement of Ireland under British rule, the fact that the Irish failed to produce a working 19th Century state and also the shame of the Irish being forced out of their native country.

In its global perspective the book focuses on representative individuals like Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel. After being exiled from Ireland to Australia, both men came to America. Meagher became a supporter of the Union Army during the Civil War and eventually was governor of Montana, whereas Mitchel fought for the Confederacy and was adamantly anti-abolition.

Keneally described himself as having "a passion for character," whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction. Speaking about his new book, he said: "It attempts to go from the macro, the wide-angle shot, to the intimate shot. I tried to create a book in which one was aware of the surge of history, but you were never far away from the impact of that history upon the flesh of this or that individual."

The idea for "The Great Shame" came from Keneally's editor, Nan Talese. The actual impetus to begin it was the discovery of a letter written by an Irishwoman named Esther Larkin pleading with the government to let her and her children join her husband, Hugh, who was serving a life sentence in Australia. The petition was rejected, and Hugh Larkin began a new family in Australia. One of his descendants is Keneally's wife. In the book Larkin represents the ordinary man, in direct contrast to Meagher, Mitchel and others, who became significant figures in Irish and American history.

Occasionally Keneally is swept away into stormy narrative seas, as in his report on the escape from Australia of John Boyle O'Reilly, a novelist, poet and journalist. O'Reilly's voyage to America on a whaling ship has echoes of Herman Melville. "I really felt the impulses that moved Melville," Keneally said. "That period of whaling was an extraordinary phenomenon." Thinking about it he decided there was also a relationship between "whaling and convictism, as men and women are chained in the bottom of the ship, feeling they are in the belly of the beast."

As a novelist in one of his few incursions into the world of non-fiction, he was a man in conflict with himself: "I was aware that I was incorporating potentially wonderful fictive storytelling into this book as documented history," he said. "When I wrote it, novels were queuing up outside the door, like cabs at the airport that I was supposed to be catching, and wasn't able to."

Keneally has been writing stories ever since his childhood when he was a student in a Christian Brothers seminary in Sydney. At the time he was considering the priesthood as a vocation. (Coincidentally, the woman who was to become his wife had thought about becoming a nun. The two had not yet met.) At the seminary one of the brothers told him that one day he should write about Meagher's exciting life. When "The Great Shame" was published in Australia, the author heard from the Christian brother, who said, "At last you've done your homework."

While continuing to write, Keneally studied law, then became a high school teacher. One obstacle to his career as an author was the absence of role models. "The Australia I grew up in was not one with a visible literary community," he said. "There were isolated and lonely figures like Patrick White, who would ultimately win the Nobel Prize. When I was a kid I wondered if you could be an Australian and a writer. We had such a sense of cultural inferiority."